Tim Blair

Tim Blair
–,
Tuesday,
December,
18,
2012,(4:26am)

The first thing people do when some maniac begins firing a gun is to call for help from other people who carry guns. Just a thought, but it might be more efficient if those closer to the scene carried guns in the first place. Which brings us to Fairfax’s Nick O’Malley:

Despite the carnage, the gun lobby has never seemed more powerful; each week it wins new victories. The day before the shootings in Newtown, politicians in Michigan ignored the protests of school boards and passed a law allowing people to carry concealed weapons in schools.

Does O’Malley think it a bad thing that US schools might possess the ability to stop murderers? Doing so is the ambition of both sides in the ongoing firearms debate, which at one level is simply an issue of timing: do you want your armed responder to turn up now or later?

Once again, none of this is to diminish the horror of the Sandy Hook slaughter, but while everyone is urging legislative change to deal with mass slayings, it’s worth considering some history:

Those who study mass shootings say they are not becoming more common.

“There is no pattern, there is no increase,” says criminologist James Allen Fox of Boston’s Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.

The random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox says …

Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.

Chances of being killed in a mass shooting, he says, are probably no greater than being struck by lightning.

The goal is to make these atrocities less frequent still. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman points out that US schools are required by legislation to guard against fire – despite student deaths caused by fire being far less likely than mass shootings, for which relatively little preparation is evident.

Well, maybe declaring schools to be “gun-free zones” is a kind of preparation. It doesn’t seem to stop killers turning up with guns, however. Nor does it stop schools subsequently calling for armed assistance. The most practical method of reducing shooting deaths at US schools might be to bring that assistance forward.

Many in Australia have pointed to the gun control legislation introduced by John Howard as a template for Barack Obama to follow. Instead, Obama might find his guidance in the way Howard’s legislation went against the conservative Prime Minister’s political base. Rather than push for Democrat-friendly gun control laws that will do little to constrain killers seeking soft targets, Obama could go counter-intuitive and propose to fund armed security for all schools.

As the President himself asked: “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage?”

UPDATE. Australian views on the US gun issue are mostly framed by pieces like this, depicting the US as a blood-drenched nation of gun cranks laying waste to all before them. But check the numbers:

• There are around 12,000 gun homicides in the US every year, which works out to about 0.0038 per cent of the US population.

• If an identical percentage of our population were to be killed on Australian roads each year, we’d have a road toll of 860.